Mary Whitehouse, who died on November 23rd aged 91, was a schoolteacher who began an unlikely second career in the mid-1960s as a self-appointed, and much derided, guardian of British morals.
She ended it more than 40 years later, in a different social climate - one that owed something to her - often enjoying the personal respect even of those who still regarded her views as simplistic and nannyish.
As founder president of what became the UK's National Viewers and Listeners Association, she was a unique public personality, who brilliantly used and manipulated the BBC and other media in the very act of castigating them. Her benevolently steely smile, baroque spectacles and ready quotes made her better known than most government ministers. A raft of, in her eyes, malefactors fell victim to the force of her dedicated, some said blinkered, personality.
One of the most illustrious was Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, director-general of the BBC, who, in 1962, had sanctioned the satirical TV show, That Was the Week That Was, which set out to broaden the limits of acceptability in art and comment. Alf Garnett, the bigot of Till Death Us Do Part, was also allowed to say the word "bloody" every 10 seconds or so.
It had been during the 1963 sex scandal surrounding the then British minister for war John Profumo, that Mrs Whitehouse, then a senior mistress teaching art and giving sex education lessons at Madeley school, Shropshire, found some of her pupils mimicking sexual intercourse. They told her they were imitating two of the women embroiled in the Profumo affair, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, whom they had seen on television.
From that moment, the director-general and she were on a collision course. The patrician Sir Hugh repeatedly refused to see the lower middle-class midlander, and developed such a distaste for her that he once bought an oil painting showing her with five breasts. But he had dangerously underestimated her.
Mary Whitehouse's first shots were directed at a spot on the programme, This Nation Tomorrow, in which Dr Alex Comfort, the anarchic author of Sex In Society and its sequels, had suggested that the institution of marriage was propped up only by adultery, and that chastity was no more a virtue than malnutrition. Mary Whitehouse wrote protesting to the then chairman of the BBC governors Sir Arthur fforde, a devout Christian who, nevertheless, backed Sir Hugh Carleton Greene.
Mary Whitehouse then gunned for Greene direct, once remarking, "If you were to ask me to name the one man who more than anybody else had been responsible for the moral collapse in this country, I would name Greene." She was, even then, far less personally and politically defenceless than she seemed. Educated at a grammar school and a county training college, where she specialised in art, she had been part of Frank Buchman's proto-fundamentalist Oxford Movement, which became Moral Rearmament (MRA). At one of its events, she had met Ernest Whitehouse, director of a family coppersmith firm, who, in 1940, became her husband, father of her three sons, and later helpmate in her campaigns.
She never lacked personal ruthlessness, even when it hurt. For years, she and her husband had separate bedrooms because, she said, their sleeping patterns were different. Ernest did the housework, while she made as many as 300 speeches a year. The influence of MRA on her life and stances was never clear.
In 1964, she engineered some organisational back-up to her iron determination to, as she saw it, clean up the BBC. She called a public meeting at Birmingham town hall to protest at what she saw as a tide of filth. The 2,000 seats were all filled; coachloads of supporters had arrived from all over the country and the Clean Up TV campaign was formed.
In ensuing years, there were to be many attacks on her which, she claimed, might have beaten her if God had not always told her what to do.
In practice, she and her direct line to God were, ultimately, too much for Sir Hugh Carleton Greene and libertarianism. She claimed the credit for his departure with considerable relish.
What had happened was that Lord Hill, the Tory politician and wartime radio doctor, had been mischievously appointed as BBC chairman in succession to Lord Normanbrook by the then prime minister Harold Wilson, who had his own grievances against the corporation. Hill lunched Mary Whitehouse to make it clear he was a hands-on chairman; with Greene's back-up gone, his own position became impossible.
Mary Whitehouse also took uncontested credit for having the editor of the UK's Gay News, Denis Lemon, fined for publishing a poem in which Jesus on the Cross had masochistic, homoerotic feelings towards a Roman soldier. This was in 1976 when she brought a private prosecution for blasphemous libel, the first in living memory. She clashed often with the counter-culture magazine OZ, and its editor Richard Neville.
Her weakness was that her inability to distinguish between what was an offence to human decency and what was mere excess in language - like using the word "bloody" or saying "bum" instead of bottom - often gave the impression of a scatter-gun approach.
But it was possible for many middle-of-the-roaders to think she was just possibly right. She objected to Howard Brenton's play, The Romans In Britain, in which a Roman soldier was seen sodomising a British youth. Many who might have accepted the fact of what had happened as a symbol of subjugation might also have felt that the action could have been implied rather than shown.
But attacks on the British comedian Benny Hill, the failure to see that Alf Garnett was being sent up rather than praised, the focusing, out of context, on sexual intercourse in British author Dennis Potter's plays, made it easier for those who regarded Mary Whitehouse as a meddling, narrow-minded, battleaxe to attack her.
The British broadcaster Ned Sherrin once remarked: "If she had been ignored for the last 30 years the world would have been a better place."
But, by the end of the 20th century, Mary Whitehouse was an institution beginning to come back into fashion, and a new generation, rebelling against their 1960s parents, was more prepared to listen, less prepared to believe that if it was lewd, it must be art.
Her husband died last year and she is survived by their three sons.
Mary Whitehouse: born 1910; died, November 2001